This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud

would have been hired at all, because that was, very nearly, the extent of her duties for the day. She tidied the place, but more or less of her own accord, and sometimes she wondered if Madame would even notice if she let things go. This was absurd, of course—Madame noticed everything.
    She would get up and dress herself without assistance—often wearing the same chemise that she’d slept in, along with a pair of trousers belonging to the professor (her husband, by then deceased), which she rolled to the knee. Then she listened to Wagner, placing the needle mid-record herself and allowing the aria to play through, at least several times. It was always the same: “Erda’sWarning,” from scene 4 of Das Rheingold . Initially it had agitated Martha to begin every morning in this way, but she grew used to it quickly, and after a while even began to look forward to the ritual. Within a single month she could replay the exact progression of the scene in her head and found herself doing so on occasion—sometimes long after she’d left Madame and Madame’s apartment behind. Which she did, less than a year later. Arriving at Charlie’s smaller, sunnier apartment in the Eleventh, with the French doors (it had seemed, when she’d visited Charlie and fallen in love, that it was for those doors, and not for Paris—or for Charlie—that she’d come), she found her mornings without the Wagner rather quiet.
    Madame also insisted, despite Martha’s repeated efforts, on assembling her own meals, which consisted of three long baguette sandwiches, for which Martha purchased the bread each morning. The cheese she bought according to the specific request of Madame from a vendor at the Thursday market who had been described in such unfaultable detail that she’d spotted him immediately, still several stalls away. She’d noticed his hair first, half curly, and then the way that his forehead sloped and completed itself— “à ne pas manquer” —in a long and narrow nose.
    Once, at the beginning of her stay, Martha—having helped herself generously to the cheese—replaced it midweek with one from a Saturday market farther along the boulevard. This cheese had looked and smelled, to Martha, just the same, and she had hoped (knowing, truly,nothing then) that it was . Madame Bernard, however, had frowned when opening the package and, with a polite sniff, asked Martha to refrain in the future from les jeux when it came to les fromages . Martha’s French was still so poor that at first she assumed Madame was objecting to her jupes —the short skirts she wore in those days—until she remembered that Madame was blind.
    Meals for Martha were to be included in the arrangement that she and Madame Bernard had agreed upon, but on her arrival nothing was provided and no mention of an alternative plan made. She walked by the fruit stands on market days, her eyes lingering on the apples and bananas and pears; but never once did she afford herself the luxury of purchasing anything. One Thursday, however, before leaving for the market, she worked up the courage to request a little extra money, with which she might buy a few items of her own. Madame was positioned comfortably in her favourite chair, reading in the dark, as she always did in the late afternoon. (It never failed to surprise Martha to come across her that way: in the near blackness, a book open on her knee.)
    Madame did not look up as Martha approached—nor as, in elliptical sentences that looped back on themselves and led ultimately nowhere, she commenced her stumbling appeal. Not once did Madame interrupt, or offer anything—some predicate, some verb—into the silences that sometimes ensued. (It was within these silences that Martha seemed almost to live in those days, as though sheimagined that the words she did not yet know dwelt there, too, and so there she hunted for